Although race relations in the United States between whites and African Americans have significantly improved since the abolishment of Jim Crow laws, director Spike Lee’s socially conscious satire, Bamboozled shows that discrimination has only evolved.
Released in 2000, the film sought to edify the African American population about the racist and stereotypical treatments blacks endured during the Jim Crow era when they were used to entertain the white masses. Moreover, it also shows how that culture is still propagated today, with African American film makers just as guilty. From the time the first African set foot in the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, race relations have always been whites’ superiority over blacks.
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Using the racist Minstrel shows, Delacroix comes up with Mantan: The New Millennial Minstrel Show, featuring an impoverish tap dancer Manray and his friend Womack, who he transforms into two coons, Mantan and Sleep and Eat. Pitching the idea to his white boss, Thomas Dunwitty, the idea was adopted with much fervour. Dunwitty believed that cultural appropriation allows for the whites to share in black culture but failed to see how derogatory the Minstrel show was to African Americans, therefore he pushes the idea to his bosses. Skipping forward, the Minstrel show, although receiving condemnation from equal rights activists, becomes a big success, even moving the defeated Delacroix to a feeling of esteem and achievement.
The crux of Lee’s story was that in the Minstrel show, the characters were African Americans, showing that that instead of white making fun of the blacks, the blacks were doing it to themselves. In the film, the audience comprised of both whites and blacks, who laughed heartily at the coons, who were of course, ignorant, dimwitted, poor and